Douglas McLennan

It's not too much of a stretch to think that the movie theatre business - when it returns - will be considerably scaled down and that distribution will have been rethought.

It's hard to get more local than One Reel, its artistic and creative pedigree is unsurpassed here, and even the company slogan "Our stage is Seattle" is encouraging.

This focus on mixing as many uses as possible within the same space challenges much of the planning orthodoxy of the past century or so, which has studiously attempted to separate residential areas from retail, entertainment, manufacturing, and office districts.

Seattle, which has declared its desire to cut carbon emissions in the region, has instead fallen behind, coming up well shy of its reduction goals. One of the big culprits? Phenomenal growth in air traffic in and out of Sea-Tac, where passenger traffic increased from 34.8 million in 2013 to 49.8 million in 2018, an annual growth of about 8 percent.

King County Library System is the third-busiest e-book lender in the country (after the Los Angeles Public Library and the Wisconsin Public Library Consortium) and fourth-largest in the world (Toronto is No.1 with more than 6 million checkouts). But the Seattle region tops all libraries in digital checkouts when you add in Seattle Public Libraries, which posted more than 3 million digital checkouts in 2019.

Many of Seattle's arts institutions are so focused on the essentials of survival it’s increasingly difficult to experiment or play. When margins are so close, a failed project is less tolerable.

A decade ago the orchestra was badly broken. After ten years of huge progress the SSO is playing better than it ever has and is a model of reinvention. And now another crossroads.

Facebook's "benevolence" in investing hundreds of millions in paying for some content is really the nail in the coffin.

What explains the flagging fortunes of Bumbershoot, which has over the past 20 years become less and less distinctive, spectacularly more expensive to attend, and suffered diminished attendance and an increasingly unsustainable business model?

Now, after hearing from voters, officials are risking further distrust by ignoring them thereby putting in jeopardy future tax asks, no matter how justified.